On timber and Trumplandia: "timber is a real thing when you get out of New York and Washington DC, right?"

This Q & A feature from the Princeton Alumni Weekly is annoyingly hard to read because it captures the spoken word, unedited. Still, I found myself wanting to share this excerpt from the interview with Carolyn Rouse of Princeton University's Anthropology Department because in some ways it captures beautifully the rural-urban divide in our country.  In particular, it sums up urban folks' failure to understand rural economies, rural labor markets, rural residents, rural concerns.  

...being in California, I was staying in a motel next to a timber mill. We would pass cars with, you know, trucks with timber. Timber is a real thing when you get out of New York or Washington DC, right? And so, how do you frame [a scholarly paper/inquiry] in a way that makes readers in your audience — I mean, the concern is the audience, right? Well, who’s going to read a paper if they’re not interested in timber? So, but timber’s really important. We use it to build houses and buildings, and there’s an ecological element to it, right? So where are we with — I don’t even know. I don’t know where we are with respect to timber in terms of global warming, in terms of — right, the economy, nothing, right?

Rouse is talking about timber, but it seems to me we could substitute lots of rural "products"--perhaps even food/farming/agriculture--for "timber" in Rouse's comment. 
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